Quotes of the Day

Q: What's the best way to ace the Graduate Record Examinations? a) Study hard; b) Guess blindly; c) Cheat. For some aspiring grad students in Asia, the answer apparently is "c." According to administrators of the GRE, the primary entrance exam used by U.S. graduate schools, a substantial number of the 55,000 annual applicants in China, Taiwan and Korea may have raised their verbal English scores by cribbing answers supplied by Chinese and Korean websites. Educational Testing Service, the U.S. company that runs the GRE, claims students were able to beat the system because electronic tests were offered so frequently that questions had to be re-used often. That made it easy for students to compare notes and tip off their peers via the Internet. The service will suspend electronic versions of the exam in the three countries, instead giving paper-based tests just twice a year. Officials became suspicious after colleges complained that incoming students' impressive scores were sometimes belied by their lousy English. It's unclear how many were involved, but in China alone the average verbal score rose by more than 14% this year compared with last year, a gain officials say can only be explained by mass cheating. Officials can't tell who broke the rules, so all individual scores will stand. Who says cheaters never prosper?

• Bryan Walsh
• An Internet loophole allows rampant cheating on grad school tests